Why do you think that you can't trust their anti virus software then? If getting a virus could put a halt to your system, surely they wouldn't that??

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Firstly it's a MS product and as such should be treated as alpha / beta ware. Secondly The updates they release for it are always days or weeks later than dedicated AV companies updates. Thirdly i would rather trust a company whose sole purpose is to detect and prevent viruses & spyware, rather than a little department inside of a company doing 100 other things.

Arstechnica had an article on it, your comment seems to jog my memory though that it's if you try and do the upgrade from 7/8 with a fresh USB install that you run into problems. Maybe upgrading then doing a clean install would bypass that. I've only done the upgrade through windows update. Was going to do a clean install but that article out me off of it. Just didn't want to deal with it.

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Thanks, i'll go find the article and give it a read. Yeah once you've upgraded, you can then clean install without any activation issues, you don't even need to bother entering a key as it registers your hardware on the MS activation servers. You should only have issues if you change a major component (hard drive, motherboard, cpu etc).

I believe that defender is a solid app but does not get the updates as quickly as commercial apps do. That said, I use a third party app.

Windows 10 will do a clean install but you must have the activation code from the side of your PC.

Windows 10 also allows for immediate download and updates. It can be difficult to regulate when your PC gets updates but there are guides to walk you through it.

If your machine is new and the hard drive is chugging, you may be downloading updates. Once you download an update, you become a peer for sharing that update to other computers. The sharing option can be turned off also.

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Defender isn't actually that bad, it's just constantly out of date when you compare it to 3rd party offerings.

Yes the retail version of windows 10 will clean install without issue, as will the oem on 1st install or reinstall (unless any major hardware changes have taken place). But the free upgrade won't, without actually upgrading first it won't activate and you have to call MS to get it resolved.

MS generally stick to a 1st Tuesday of the month release schedule for windows update. However with windows 10 they have been releasing updates on a much quicker scale, trying to fix the numerous bugs they left in it.

Yeah, you gotta love MS using every windows 10 machine as a peer by default. Saves them lots of bandwidth and server resources.

Even though I generally agree with you, this is no longer necessarily true, for instance take a look at this about Ubuntu from wikipedia (footnotes removed):

"One of the new features of Unity in Ubuntu 12.10 was the shopping lens—Amazon search results displayed in the Unity dash. It was alternately described as the "Amazon controversy", "privacy fiasco" and "spyware".
From October 2012, it sent the user's queries through a secure HTTPS connection from the home lens to productsearch.ubuntu.com, which then polled Amazon.com to find relevant products; Amazon then sent product images directly to the user's computer through HTTP. If the user clicked on one of these results and then bought something, Canonical got a small fraction of the sale.
In 2012, many reviewers criticized it: as the home lens is the normal means to search for content on the local machine, reviewers were concerned about the disclosure of queries that were intended to be local, creating a privacy problem. As the feature is active by default instead of opt-in, many users could be unaware of it."

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I think it deserves mentioning because Ubuntu is one of the more likely choices for a new-to-linux user coming from a Windows environment.
This is actually the same reason i will be moving away from CyanogenMod for my phone.

That said, I am in the process of installing linux mint (which is based on Ubuntu, but without the aforementioned issue) on my girlfriends laptop as she upgraded from Windows 7 to 10, without consulting with me, and I soon found out most of the hardware didn't have Windows 10 supported drivers. Instead of rolling back to 7 we agreed she should try a user-friendly version of linux as she only uses it for browsing, documents, spotify and the like anyway, and the original Windows version was full of bloatware (I don't know how many friends have asked me to fix their brand new computer thinking they had contracted a virus or spyware only to find out the pre-installed bloatware was the cause of all the grievance), not to mention the not totally absent, but greatly diminished chance of virus/malware/spyware.

All this said, on Windows i usually stick to Avast or AVGfree (just don't install all the extra stuff they AVG tries to push on you). And please stay away from Norton Antivirus, which in my opinion is as bad as a lot of viruses/malware.

Written on my laptop running Arch Linux with Openbox (desktop also runs arch, and i have a laptop with debian/Windows 10 in dualboot)

Even though I generally agree with you, this is no longer necessarily true, for instance take a look at this about Ubuntu from wikipedia (footnotes removed):

I think it deserves mentioning because Ubuntu is one of the more likely choices for a new-to-linux user coming from a Windows environment.
This is actually the same reason i will be moving away from CyanogenMod for my phone.

That said, I am in the process of installing linux mint (which is based on Ubuntu, but without the aforementioned issue) on my girlfriends laptop as she upgraded from Windows 7 to 10, without consulting with me, and I soon found out most of the hardware didn't have Windows 10 supported drivers. Instead of rolling back to 7 we agreed she should try a user-friendly version of linux as she only uses it for browsing, documents, spotify and the like anyway, and the original Windows version was full of bloatware (I don't know how many friends have asked me to fix their brand new computer thinking they had contracted a virus or spyware only to find out the pre-installed bloatware was the cause of all the grievance), not to mention the not totally absent, but greatly diminished chance of virus/malware/spyware.

All this said, on Windows i usually stick to Avast or AVGfree (just don't install all the extra stuff they AVG tries to push on you). And please stay away from Norton Antivirus, which in my opinion is as bad as a lot of viruses/malware.

Written on my laptop running Arch Linux with Openbox (desktop also runs arch, and i have a laptop with debian/Windows 10 in dualboot)

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I get that and never liked the Amazon results but, to be fair, it's a one click opt out AND we're less than a month from 16.04 which is opt in by default. Jus' sayin...

I get that and never liked the Amazon results but, to be fair, it's a one click opt out AND we're less than a month from 16.04 which is opt in by default. Jus' sayin...

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Sorry didn't know it was settled that it would become opt-in, but that is great news (news to me). Nothing could be better. I guess i still think it is a valid point that not all linux distros will necessarily be respecting your privacy, and that some distros have large commercial interests even though they are free to use. The reason why I mentioned CyanoGenMod even though that is strictly not linux, but an Android fork, is that microsoft invested in them, and as of Jan 2016 you will get commercials for Microsoft (which is probably the company you are trying to get away from by switching to linux/android). I'm sure you know all this, so I guess my point is that new-to-linux users should be aware that not everything that looks like open-source or privacy respecting distros necessarily will be. And even though most of them are to this day, we should be aware of the future (its always good to worry a bit when stuff happens like when the Ubuntu Manifesto suddenly disappeared from their website).

In newer computers that ship with Windows 8 or 10, the Windows activation key is stored in BIOS. Therefore, if you don't do any major hardware changes, you can install and uninstall all you want. I recommend doing a clean install with the USB tool - it works fine and actually does a clean install. Keep in mind that it won't install your drivers, so you might want to download those beforehand, otherwise you'll have to use another computer or an Ethernet connection to download them.

Panda Free is a great antivirus. It's unobtrusive and works very well.